TidBITS#1064/21-Feb-2011
========================
Issue link:
There are weeks with themes, and then there are weeks like this, where
there’s no commonality between our articles. We start with the
announcement of four more locations and dates for the MacTech Boot
Camp conference for consultants. Then Jeff Carlson writes about
gfxCardStatus, a must-have utility for MacBook Pro owners, and Glenn
Fleishman looks at the QuickMark 2D code application for the Mac.
Next, we recently released version 1.4 of the TidBITS News iOS app,
and Matt Neuburg uses its primary new feature to explain why adding
multitasking to an app is harder than it would seem. Then Adam shares
an upcoming behind-the-scenes change (a new From address for TidBITS
in email) and looks into the geeky technical details behind it.
Finally, Jeff Porten anchors the issue with a report from the .nxt
conference on new top-level domain names—the question is, does anyone
still care? Notable software releases this week include Skitch 1.0.3,
Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 3.6, Evernote 2.0.4, CopyPaste
Pro 3.0, 1Password 3.5.7, iWeb 3.0.3, and Adobe Acrobat/Reader 10.0.1.
Articles
MacTech Boot Camp Adds Four More Cities
QuickMark Brings 2D Codes to the Mac
Check Your Filters: TidBITS Issue From Address Changing
Improve MacBook Pro Battery Life with gfxCardStatus
TidBITS News App 1.4 Allows Background Audio
Should We Care about New Top-Level Domains?
TidBITS Watchlist: Notable Software Updates for 21 February 2011
ExtraBITS for 21 February 2011
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MacTech Boot Camp Adds Four More Cities
---------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst
article link:
Reports from the MacTech Boot Camp in San Francisco last month
indicate that it was a success, with the one-day conference selling
out and garnering positive comments from attendees and speakers
alike (though, apparently, there were no drill sergeants or pushup
requirements). Building on that success, MacTech has now announced
additional Boot Camp conferences for consultants and support techs
around the United States. The new events are:
* MacTech Boot Camp Dallas, on 27 April 2011
* MacTech Boot Camp Boston, on 18 May 2011
* MacTech Boot Camp Los Angeles, on 27 July 2011
* MacTech Boot Camp Chicago, on 31 August 2011
The additional locations and dates should be welcome for those who
couldn’t make the trip to San Francisco for the initial MacTech
Boot Camp and the subsequent Macworld 2011 back in January.
MacTech has announced session chairs for each of the conferences,
and although the sessions won’t be identical, the conferences will
all cover roughly similar topics, including things like handling
clients, support call techniques, remote support, backup systems,
Windows on the Mac, networking basics and troubleshooting, marketing
oneself, and resources for finding answers to tricky problems.
Registration for the one-day conference costs $495, and by
registering early, you can drop that to $295.
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QuickMark Brings 2D Codes to the Mac
------------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman
article link:
2 comments
Two-dimensional tags that provide a URL, address card, location
coordinates, or plain text can now be easily decoded under Mac OS X
with the new QuickMark release. The $2.99 QuickMark reads standard
2D codes (QR Code and Data Matrix) as well as its own Quick Code
format. These codes are increasingly found in newspapers, magazines,
advertisements, and physical goods sold at retail. (We even provide
QR codes at the bottom of each TidBITS article to let you transfer
the URL between devices to continue reading; see “Tag, You’re in
2D!,” 1 October 2009.)
QuickMark’s eponymous Mac program, available through the Mac App
Store, has three functions. It can use a camera (built-in iSight or
FaceTime, or third-party) to recognize and carry out an action on a
2D tag. This includes opening a URL in a browser, switching to Skype
for a phone call or to send an SMS, or using Google Maps via a
browser to display a location. It can also take text you enter and
produce a 2D code in any of the formats it reads. Finally, you can
drag an image into the scanning window or select an image from a
menu, and QuickMark will decode any 2D tag that the image contains.
The Mac app cannot read 1D barcodes, such as the kind used for ISBNs
on books.
I have been using QuickMark’s $0.99 iOS app for some time quite
happily on my iPhone for 2D code scanning and creation. The codes
were put into wide use in Japan nearly a decade ago in a partnership
between mobile phone companies, handset makers, advertisers, and
publishers. They have finally taken off in the United States:
there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t see several
prominently displayed in store windows, see them in newspaper and
magazine ads, or note them on Web sites I visit. I even received an
ad flyer yesterday in the snail mail that had a code on it. (The iOS
app can read 1D codes.)
The Mac version unfortunately shows the developers’ lack of
familiarity with Mac OS X: you cannot paste into the text field for
creating a 2D tag, and, for that matter, it lacks copy and paste
commands entirely. You can type in text, or drag text from a browser
address bar into the text field. But these limitations should be
easy to fix, and I’m sure user feedback will help QuickMark
improve.
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Check Your Filters: TidBITS Issue From Address Changing
-------------------------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst
article link:
For subscribers to our free weekly mailing lists compiled from
articles that appear at the TidBITS Web site, I’m offering an
administrative heads-up about a change in how we will be sending out
email. Starting with TidBITS #1065 next week, our issue email
headers will be slightly different, a move that we didn’t
anticipate, but one that has turned out to be necessary for bounce
processing in our new system to work.
I’m providing this advance warning because if you have whitelisted
email from editors@tidbits.com in your spam filter, it’s possible
that next week’s issue—which will come from a different address
at our domain—will be marked as spam. If TidBITS doesn’t arrive
next week, that’s probably why, and you should go spelunking in
your spam folder. Also, if you move TidBITS issues to another
mailbox via a rule that keys off editors@tidbits.com appearing in
the From line, that will need changing too. Sorry for any
inconvenience!
In an ideal world, we would make the change and everything would
just work with no need for you to do anything. But assuming that
Murphy’s Law remains intact, here’s what you might need to know.
The From address in all editions of next week’s TidBITS issue will
change from editors@tidbits.com to tb-mailer@tidbits.com, as in:
From: TidBITS Editors
That tb-mailer@tidbits.com address is what you’ll want to add to
any spam filters that allow you to whitelist (approve automatically)
messages from specific senders. However, it’s not the best way to
filter TidBITS issues to a different mailbox. For that, I recommend
using a rule that relies on the List-Id header. Our list headers are
specific to each version of TidBITS; you can see which one you
receive by viewing the full headers for the message.
List-Id: TidBITS Text Issue List
List-Id: TidBITS HTML Issue List
List-Id: TidBITS Text Announcement List
List-Id: TidBITS HTML Announcement List
**Reply-To Changing Too** -- Also changing next week will be the
Reply-To address in the issue. The new address will not be read by a
person, but will instead generate an auto-reply that explains the
best ways to contact us for different purposes.
Why the auto-reply? The simple fact of the matter is that there are
a lot of different ways to contact us, and which is most appropriate
depends on the situation. For instance, if you’re writing to
comment on an article, we’d much rather have you leave a comment
on the article itself than send us email. And if you’re really
shy, you can always email an author directly—using a link next to
the byline on every article—or ping them via Twitter (check our
Contact Info page for staff details).
If you have a problem with our Web site or with our email issues, it
would be great if you could ask on our TidBITS Get Satisfaction
site, where we can reply in public and others with similar questions
can benefit from our answer to you. If the problem is something you
think I should know about right away, ping me via Twitter.
On the other hand, for questions about your account, where we
can’t really help you unless we know your email address, private
email makes more sense than Get Satisfaction. (The same goes for
Take Control—general questions and suggestions are best sent to
the Take Control Get Satisfaction site, whereas account-specific
questions should be sent via private email.)
And if you have a technical question that’s unrelated to a
particular TidBITS article or even TidBITS itself, you’d be best
off asking in our TidBITS Talk discussion list, though it now limits
posts to subscribers to block the constant onslaught of spam.
**The MTA Behind the Curtain** -- I realize this next bit gets very
specific, but since we were surprised by this situation, I wanted to
share our findings in case anyone else were to run into a similar
problem. (And if you don’t know or care what an MTA is, or how
mail servers operate, there’s no need to keep reading.)
When we were using Web Crossing, it acted as both the mailing list
software (generating the actual messages to send out) and as the
mail transfer agent, or MTA. Because it wore both hats, Web Crossing
was able to customize the headers of each individual message to
identify and process bounces. In particular, Web Crossing added a
customized Return-Path header, as in:
Return-Path:
And notably, that header was different from the From line:
From: "TidBITS Editors"
That’s important because only the MTA can insert the Return-Path
header. Since our homegrown TidBITS Publishing System is acting as
the mailing list software, and handing messages off to sendmail (via
a library) to deliver, sendmail inserts the Return-Path header
automatically, basing it on the From header. Thus, both the
Return-Path and From pointed at editors@tidbits.com. Although it’s
conceivable that sendmail could be configured to insert a different
Return-Path header, that’s apparently not possible with the
library that we’re using to connect sendmail to the TidBITS
Publishing System.
Since we had always had the From address be editors@tidbits.com and
didn’t change it for our first use of the new system, we were a
little shocked when bounces came back to that address rather than to
the address listed in the Errors-To header. It turns out that
Errors-To is not a standard, unlike Return-Path, so it worked in
some cases, but by no means universally.
Anyway, we believe the solution is simple—to set the From line to
contain an address that will be replicated into the Return-Path
header and that can receive and process bounces appropriately. But
we figured that many people would either be whitelisting
editors@tidbits.com or filtering based on it; hence this message.
Glad you asked?
We now return you to your regularly scheduled issue of TidBITS.
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Improve MacBook Pro Battery Life with gfxCardStatus
---------------------------------------------------
by Jeff Carlson
article link:
Roughly every three years, I replace my MacBook Pro with a new
model. That cycle gives me plenty of use out of each machine, but
also means I leapfrog into features that appeared in intervening
models.
Buying a new MacBook Pro (with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7 processor)
last year was like a surprise birthday gift: It boasts significantly
better battery life, the full range of multi-touch trackpad
gestures, the aluminum unibody construction (which I’m surprised
is one of my favorite features—it just feels so much more sturdy
than previous models), and a high-resolution LED screen.
This laptop also includes two graphics cards (designated as GPUs, or
graphics processing units): the integrated Intel HD Graphics, and a
discrete Nvidia GeForce GT 330M. The former is designed for low
power consumption, and therefore better battery life, while the
latter kicks in to provide graphics horsepower when needed.
Earlier dual-GPU MacBook Pros required that you specify which
graphics mode to use in the Energy Saver preference pane, and then
log out and log back in to your user account. Starting with the
mid-2010 models, the switching occurs automatically: when an
application is launched that requires more graphics power, the
discrete Nvidia GPU fires up. Otherwise, the integrated Intel GPU
provides the graphics without burning through the battery’s
charge. (You can turn off automatic switching in the preference
pane, which leaves the Nvidia chip active all the time.)
When working away from my desk, I want to get the longest battery
life I can. I would quit any obvious GPU hogs such as Photoshop,
iPhoto, or iMovie, but I couldn’t easily tell whether my MacBook
Pro had switched to the integrated GPU.
To determine which GPU is active, you have to open the System
Profiler application (press Option and choose System Profiler from
the Apple menu), click the Graphics/Displays item under Hardware in
the sidebar, and select the Intel or Nvidia video card. The one
being used includes a Main Display: Yes.
So, I would quit some obvious applications, go back to System
Profiler, press Command-R to refresh the data, and see if “Main
Display: Yes” appeared in the Intel GPU. I felt like I’d been
transported back to the days of hunting disagreeable startup
extensions in Mac OS 8.
However, it turns out the Nvidia GPU can be triggered by
applications you wouldn’t think of as being traditionally graphics
hungry, such as most Twitter clients and even stalwart Fetch
(perhaps because of the running dog progress animation?). Sure, I
still get better battery life on this machine when using the Nvidia
GPU than I did on my old laptop, but that doesn’t mean I don’t
want to take advantage of low-power integrated graphics.
Initially, I installed Cody Krieger’s free gfxCardStatus 2.0
because it adds a menu bar icon that identifies which GPU is in use:
a simple “i” for Intel (or “integrated”), or “n” for
Nvidia. That alone saved a lot of time and frustration.
But then I noticed that when you click the icon, gfxCardStatus
helpfully reveals which applications are forcing the discrete GPU,
listed under Dependencies.
The utility goes beyond just reporting, though. You can force the
MacBook Pro to use just integrated Intel graphics, discrete Nvidia
graphics, or stick with dynamic switching, by choosing one of the
options in the menu.
Some applications don’t respond well to a live switchover from the
discrete to integrated GPU. BusyCal, for example, loses its
capability to move between months when it’s forced into Intel-only
mode. However, quitting and re-launching BusyCal fixes the problem
(since the software must also work on computers like the MacBook or
Mac mini that include only integrated graphics).
gfxCardStatus 2.0 was released in December 2010 and adds a helpful
new feature: it can switch GPUs based on whether you’re working on
battery or AC power. If you need the most battery life when working
on the go, you can force the integrated graphics automatically. This
feature is disabled by default, to avoid problems with apps that
don’t switch cleanly.
I haven’t timed the difference between running integrated and
discrete graphics other than to notice that the battery estimate
provided by Mac OS X’s menu bar item does increase significantly
(up to an hour more) when I’m on battery and have quit all
dependent applications.
gfxCardStatus works with the following recent MacBook Pro models:
* 2010 i5/i7 MacBook Pro with Intel HD/Nvidia GeForce GT 330M GPUs
* 2009 MacBook Pro with Nvidia GeForce 9400M/9600M GT GPUs
* Late 2008 MacBook Pro with Nvidia GeForce 9400M/9600M GT GPUs
gfxCardStatus definitely fills a narrow niche, but it’s an
elegant, helpful way to eke out the most time from your MacBook
Pro’s battery charge.
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TidBITS News App 1.4 Allows Background Audio
--------------------------------------------
by Matt Neuburg
article link:
We’ve just released a new version (1.4) of the TidBITS News iOS
app, containing two bug fixes you probably won’t notice and one
new capability which, while subtle, has been requested by users and
should make a lot of people happy. We’ll start by describing the
new capability, which has to do with audio and TidBITS News’s
interaction with other apps.
As you may know, the TidBITS News app enables you to play the
recorded audio versions of our articles. (These are the same audio
versions to which you can subscribe in iTunes as a podcast.) Because
it has the capability to play its own audio, the TidBITS News app
has to declare an “audio session policy” so the system knows
what to do in case there is any background audio. This was necessary
even under iOS 3.x, before multitasking, because the iPod app (or,
on some devices, the Music app) could play background music.
Since TidBITS News could play its own audio, and since it was
originally written for iOS 3.x, it declared its audio session policy
in a simple-minded way. When the app launched, it halted the
playback of any background audio. Admittedly, that wasn’t ideal,
since if you were happily listening to your favorite tunes via the
iPod app, the music would stop when you launched our app, even if
you weren’t planning on listening to any of our recorded articles.
Clearly, it would have been better for our audio session policy to
declare itself only if you actually did start listening to one of
our recorded articles. We were aware of this (especially because
several users of our app pointed it out to us), but it wasn’t a
high enough priority to tackle immediately.
However, iOS 4 introduced both some new ways of specifying an audio
session policy and a new capability for other apps (such as Pandora)
to play background audio; so the time had clearly come to straighten
out this situation. After some experimentation, it turned out that
we could actually change our audio session policy as you start
listening to an article recording, and change it back when you
finish. There were, in fact, two different ways we could do this:
* TidBITS News could “duck” the current background audio (play it
more quietly) when a user started playing one of our recorded
articles, and restore the background audio’s loudness when our
recorded article stopped playing. This worked perfectly, but some
people might have had difficulty hearing Adam’s dulcet tones
quietly reading an article while their favorite heavy metal band was
wailing away in the background.
* TidBITS News could halt the current background audio altogether when
a user starts playing one of our recorded articles. This worked fine
too, but unfortunately our app could not reliably resume playing the
halted background audio. In theory, such resumption is possible, and
TidBITS News attempts to do all the right things, but actual
resumption only takes place about five percent of the time. This is
probably due to a bug in iOS itself.
So our choice was between an option that worked perfectly but might
strain the user’s ability to listen to two things at once, and an
option that only half worked. We chose the latter. Ducking is not
really suitable for a lengthy, important sound like the reading of
an article, as opposed to, for instance, a brief audio notification
of an upcoming turn from a navigation app. And the fact that
background audio couldn’t reliably be resumed after pausing
wasn’t terribly important, because in a multitasking world it
isn’t hard for the user to fix this manually.
So that’s the one obvious new feature in TidBITS News 1.4. When
you enter the app, any audio that’s playing continues to play. If
you start to listen to the audio version of one of our articles,
your previous background audio will pause, and, if you’re
incredibly lucky, will resume again once you’re done listening to
our article. But if it doesn’t resume, then just use iOS 4’s
multitasking capabilities to resume it yourself. The simple way to
do this is:
1. Double-press the Home button to show the app switcher interface.
2. Swipe the app switcher to the right. This will bring in the stuff
from the left, which includes sound control buttons.
3. Tap the play/pause button to resume background audio.
4. Tap in the TidBITS News interface to dismiss the app switcher
interface.
On the user side, that’s probably all you’ll notice about this
new feature. On the developer side, however, this change was
remarkably difficult to accomplish. It turns out that our previous
audio session policy wasn’t just annoying; it was actually broken,
thanks to the advent of multitasking. Not only were we turning off
sound on launch, but also we were _failing_ to turn off sound when
the user switched away from our app and returned. So it was actually
possible for the user to subvert our annoying audio session policy.
This goes back to a point I made months ago, when iOS 4 and
multitasking first appeared (see “What is Fast App Switching?,”
23 June 2010): merely making your app participate in multitasking is
trivial—just recompile the app under a current version of
Xcode—but making it _behave properly_ under multitasking is hard.
The trouble is that as soon as your app starts to do multitasking,
things that worked just fine before can come crashing down about
your ears. The reason is that multitasking introduces lots of new
ways in which the user can leave and return to your app. Before
multitasking, there was only one way to arrive at the TidBITS News
app, namely by launching it, and only one way to leave it, namely by
quitting it. So, while it was annoying that our app turned off
background sound on launch, at least in a non-multitasking world
this was clear and definitive. But under multitasking, the user can
do lots of strange things: switch to another app and return to our
app, summon the app switching interface and return to our app, and
so forth. And it turns out that your app must actively defend
against all these possibilities by reasserting its audio session
policy in every case. TidBITS News, however, was failing to do this.
And that, in fact, is why we changed our audio session policy. We
didn’t really do it just to be nice to users who were listening to
music in the background. (After all, when you’re reading one of
our articles, you should be giving it your undivided attention!) We
did it because we discovered that our audio session policy wasn’t
working as it stood. Changing our audio session policy and its
behavior was, in fact, just something we did in the course of the
much more urgent change of unifying the app’s behavior against the
multitasking hydra.
There isn’t an Apple document that says, “Hey, if your app
switches to using multitasking, watch out! Here’s a list of things
that can go wrong, and sound is one of them.” But there should be.
In our case, multitasking broke our audio session policy and we
didn’t even notice initially. Nor did Apple’s vaunted approval
process alert us to this fact. This is probably true up and down the
line of apps. Lots of apps _think_ they have adopted multitasking
just by linking against the iOS 4 SDK and recompiling, maybe with a
few simple obvious additions like saving state on backgrounding
instead of saving it on termination. But multitasking is much, much
more complicated than that, and Apple has not made it easy either to
become a safe multitasking citizen or to discover how to become one.
Oh, and what about the other two things we fixed in this release?
One was just a good old-fashioned mistake. Images in our articles
that had been acceptable on iPhone were appearing at the wrong size
on the large iPad screen; this was merely an unnoticed consequence
of converting the app so that it ran natively on iPad (see
“TidBITS News App Updated for iPad”, 4 January 2011). We also
tried to work around a mysterious cosmetic glitch that can appear in
low-memory situations; with luck, you won’t encounter the
situation that causes this glitch (none of us had, which is why we
didn’t know about it), but the truth is that this problem is not
really fixed, and likely won’t be until we tear the app’s code
completely apart and rewrite the whole thing from scratch.
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Should We Care about New Top-Level Domains?
-------------------------------------------
by Jeff Porten
article link:
5 comments
The next Internet revolution is approaching. That’s right, in
about two years, we will no longer be forced to remember horridly
difficult URLs like britneyspears.com, and instead will be able to
go to much easier Web sites like britneyspears.music.
Doesn’t sound like much of a revolution to you? Me neither. But
others beg to differ, and differ at great length.
**The Root of All Evil** -- I caught the tail end of the .nxt
conference, an event for businesses looking to join the “Internet
land rush” of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). A TLD is the
part of a domain name following the last dot in a URL—i.e.,
“com,” “net,” or “org,” to name the three that probably
dominate your Web surfing experience. TLDs are divided into country
codes, generic, and a few technical and experimental areas. The
generic TLDs originated in the United States, and were restricted to
U.S. use before the commercial Internet began in the mid-1990s.
Those who wanted domains elsewhere had to rely on country code TLDs.
This resulted in a still-persistent historical imbalance: a major
American chocolate outfit might be found at
, while a major British confectioner
relies on . Discerning readers will note
that there’s nothing inherently American about .com. We just take
it for granted that the top-level in American URLs gets to be a
category of American organizations, rather than the entire country.
This eventually led to .com becoming the default domain for any
business in the world, and later for pretty much anyone else who
wanted their Web site to have a “normal” address.
Consider for a moment how silly it would be if everyone in the world
suddenly clamored for a phone number starting with 6, and all other
phone numbers were déclassé. That’s essentially what happened on
the Internet. Plug in a single word on almost any browser in the
last ten years (excepting those with integrated search bars), and if
they can’t find a site there, they’ll add a .com to see if
that’s what you wanted.
This has long struck many observers as ranging between a wee bit odd
and yet another blow by American hegemony against the nations of the
world. American organizations, it’s said, are the Animal Farm
first-among-equals in this system, further proven by the domain
system’s long-standing inability to have anything but non-accented
Roman characters used in names. The issue of using characters other
than those found in English has been partly solved (not yet for
TLDs). But the larger problem—the concentration of the world’s
mindshare into the .com space—remains on the docket.
That is, if it’s actually a problem at all.
**Master of Your Domain** -- Domains are created and administered by
the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, a
nonprofit organization that attempts to be the United Nations for
governments, technical organizations, and Internet citizens. It has
a very simple and straightforward organizational structure, depicted
below:
I kid about ICANN—and many times, it is eminently deserving of
kidding—but if you think about it, the above diagram isn’t all
that complicated considering what ICANN has to do. Someone has to be
in charge of the system that turns www.apple.com into 69.192.205.15.
That someone has, by definition, a global constituency. And that
global constituency, also nearly by definition, may not all be in
agreement about things like free speech and who should be able to
access and publish on the Internet.
ICANN has the job of resolving the .com problem, and they’ve done
so by opening up the gTLDs. Any organization can apply for a gTLD,
which is essentially a request for the equivalent of .com, from
which they can assign as many domains as their servers (and bank
accounts) can handle. Over 100 groups are known to have applied, and
there will probably be many more when the entire list is published
in October 2011.
If you want your own .com domain, all you have to do is head to your
favorite registrar online, pony up around ten bucks, and pick a name
that’s never been thought of before by anyone in history. If you
want your own gTLD, it’s a little more involved, starting with the
$185,000 application fee. That’s right, application fee. You can
still be turned down. gTLDs must be approved by ICANN, and they’re
looking for gTLDs which match their guidelines, such as being
existing communities or global brands. For full details, refer to
the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook Version 2, which is due to be
replaced next month with the final edition.
The premise behind both the fee and the application process is to
prevent Internet domain naming from becoming a free-for-all; if any
word can become a gTLD, it’s the equivalent, some would say, to
having U.S. phone numbers which could be any number of digits
between 10 and 30.
Which brings us to the .nxt conference, where around 100 people
gathered in a room to debate the Internet and party like it’s
1999. Own your own gTLD, with a domain that becomes a hot Internet
address, and you can set pricing for organizations and people who
wish to set up shop there. Alternately, if you’re of a more
communitarian bent, you can use your gTLD to cultivate the community
of people who host there.
Three of the domains in the latter category were regularly brought
up in discussion, especially when the would-be proprietor of .music
had his cell phone go off, playing a merry tune and interrupting the
panel when someone called out, “Great branding!” But the other
two domains give some idea of how complicated this issue can be:
.gay and .green. Give out the .green gTLD, and now there’s an
organization empowered to bestow the green name, literally, on its
applicants.
Meanwhile, the .gay domain is expected to be vigorously opposed by
quite a few nations on the stance that gay people shouldn’t be out
in public, and certainly shouldn’t be allowed to talk to each
other. And after the domain is established, it provides a handy
method for these countries to shut down access to these sites all at
once.
**Gold Rush, or Fool’s Gold?** -- The tone of the conference was
aptly captured with the presentation by Juan Diego Calle, CEO of .CO
Internet S.A.S. and proprietor of Colombia’s .co country TLD. In
his opinion (and in his marketing materials), .com is a “typo,”
and there’s a massive marketing opportunity for his company in
recapturing the historical abbreviation of “Co.” for
corporations around the world. Beyond the marketing, though, his
most salient point was his defense of why he’s in favor of
expanding the gTLD space: until the market is flooded with new
domains, no one will ever know that there’s anything beyond the
.com.
Nearly everyone in the room was in agreement that the new gTLDs
would create a new boom in business, the land rush that’s heralded
by the .nxt conference Web site. They were there to debate the
details—and from the discussion, the details of running a gTLD
registry can be extremely difficult, and there was little doubt that
many players in the space would fail, but others would go on to be
the next Internet billionaires.
This is where I apply my rather skeptical wet blanket perspective.
There’s one major problem with all this, and it can be summarized
in the one word that has become so ubiquitous that no one even
bothers adding the .com appendix: Google.
The idea that .com is the Nob Hill of the Internet dates back to a
time when a smaller and more tech-savvy Internet populace memorized
URLs; today, it’s far more common that your average Internet user
will toss the company they’re looking for into Google—and do so
repeatedly rather than memorize a URL. I wish I could remember or
reference where I heard this, but it’s not uncommon for people to
get to Google’s own home page by _Googling for Google in the
Google search bar_. For these people, it doesn’t matter if the
site they’re landing on is google.com, goo.gl, or
letmeGooglethatforyou.com. The search is what matters. [Editor’s
note: My father, now an experienced Internaut, spent at least his
first year online in the 1990s without a location bar to enter URLs
nor the knowledge that URLs existed. He used Alta Vista as his home
page. -Glenn]
Meanwhile, this is being presented in a roomful of people who
applauded and laughed when Calle referred to his initial marketing
as, and I quote, “We created a digital orgasm.” I remember when
I was drinking that sort of Kool-Aid, and it was when I was an
Internet entrepreneur in the 1990s. So my impression from the
meeting is that I _was_ at the start of something—and it’s a
business niche where companies are going to create something new and
then try to sell it to each other, because few outsiders will come
along for the ride. Addresses and branding are important, but
we’re past the point where “the right URL” will make a
business.
However, there is one major proviso.
**The Real Next Thing** -- It’s easy to judge from the perspective
of 2011, having weathered both the NASDAQ implosion and the Great
Recession, and to think that we were all a little batty in the
1990s. But the fact remains that many of the technologies we use
daily were built or invented during that time—even if the people
who ended up selling them to us weren’t the people who lost their
shirts bringing them to market.
I’m reminded of my thought process back when I purchased the
jeffporten.com domain. I’m an old-school Internet user, so I
remember the days when TLDs actually meant something. Once upon a
time, you actually had to run a network to be a .net, or have an
actual nonprofit to be a .org. Then open registration came along and
all three of these TLDs became a free-for-all.
Even so, I spent some time debating whether I should use
jeffporten.com for my personal domain. Sure, I run my own business,
but “Jeff Porten” isn’t the business; I’m just the engine.
The domain, I thought, should be something that reflected my
personhood rather than my role in a free market. .org and .net were
even less apropos—so should I go with jeffporten.info? Or even
jeffporten.name, the “official” TLD for individuals?
Of course, I went with jeffporten.com. Why? Because who the heck
uses .name? (And as I say in my Web site’s tag line: “Because
jeffporten.info is even more conceited.”) But by doing that, I’m
buying into the Nob Hill theory that I ridiculed earlier. There _is_
cachet to having the .com with your name on it, as a buddy named
Greenberg will tell you since his own named domain was snapped up by
a real estate agent.
This brings me to another bit of technology history. Way back in the
20th century, when area codes were assigned across the country, the
technology of choice was something called a “rotary phone.” When
you “dialed” a number, you turned an actual dial. Dialing a 9
took roughly nine times longer than dialing a 1. What’s less
well-known is that this meant that some area codes were “better”
than others: 212 was assigned to Manhattan because it was the
fastest to dial. You can roughly rank the perceived importance of
American cities at the time from their area codes: 212, Manhattan;
213, Los Angeles; 312, Chicago. (908: northern New Jersey.)
Zoom forward to the end of the 20th century, and we start running
into an addressing problem: phone numbers after the area code
can’t start with 1 or 0, so there are roughly 8 million phone
numbers in any one area code. Start handing out fax machines and
cell phones like candy, and that’s not such a large number
anymore. Wikipedia now lists five different area codes for New York
City alone. When the time came to stop giving out new 212 numbers,
or to take away the area codes of people who had them already, folks
fought tooth and nail to keep the better virtual real estate.
Today in the 21st century, I just Skyped a friend at his 404 Atlanta
number, he texted me back at my 202 Washington DC number, and both
of us are currently in San Francisco. Neither one of us lives in our
area code—and there are enough people like us that there’s no
longer much geographical meaning assigned to an area code. (Nor are
long-distance fees a concern in the way they were when I was growing
up.)
I expect that the current sense of normality surrounding .com will
eventually go the way of the 212 pride of place. And it may very
well be that one of the entrepreneurs in the .nxt conference room
that day will be the one who creates the new normal, the next
virtual Nob Hill. But I don’t expect that will happen by picking
out the perfect word for the gTLD, nor with brilliant marketing, nor
anything else in the usual bag of business tricks. In fact, I have
no idea how it will happen.
Nevertheless, it _will_ happen, so perhaps not everyone is batty for
believing that they’ll be the one to do it.
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TidBITS Watchlist: Notable Software Updates for 21 February 2011
----------------------------------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff
article link:
**Skitch 1.0.3** -- The screenshot-editing software Skitch has been
updated to version 1.0.3. Various bugs are fixed: key combinations
no longer trigger an upload when they shouldn’t, an issue where
Skitch misbehaved when you dragged files into it has been corrected,
and a crash affecting some newer Macs is resolved. Free users of the
Skitch service now have access to three additional image
manipulation options: Rotate, Flip, and Fonts. (Free, 6.3 MB)
Read/post comments about Skitch 1.0.3.
**Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 3.6** -- Apple’s latest
Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update extends Aperture 3 and
iPhoto ’11 support to six more cameras and fixes processing issues
for four others. Newly supported cameras include the Canon EOS Rebel
T3/1100D/Kiss X50, Canon EOS Rebel T3i/600D/Kiss X5, Olympus E-5,
Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ100, Pentax K-r, and Pentax K-5. The update
also improves the processing of images from the Nikon D7000, Nikon
Coolpix P7000, Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1, and Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2.
The update is available via Software Update and the Apple Support
Downloads page. Apple also publishes a full list of supported
cameras. (Free, 6.45 MB)
Read/post comments about Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update
3.6.
**Evernote 2.0.4** -- Memory storage software Evernote has been
updated to version 2.0.4. The new version improves PDF handling,
both preventing issues with waiting for large PDFs to load and
making it easier to drag PDFs out of the program. The update also
includes what the developers call “lots of bug fixes.” (Free,
15.9 MB)
Read/post comments about Evernote 2.0.4.
**CopyPaste Pro 3.0** -- Plum Amazing describes its multiple-clipboard
utility CopyPaste Pro as “Time Machine for your Clipboard.” New
in version 3.0 is the capability to search your clip archives,
enabling you to find anything in any clip. The Clip Revolver
feature—which existed in much older versions of the software—is
restored. Extracting email addresses from clips is improved. And new
preferences allow for enhanced control over CopyPaste’s general
behavior. ($30 new, free update, 4.3 MB)
Read/post comments about CopyPaste Pro 3.0.
**1Password 3.5.7** -- Agile Web Solutions has bumped 1Password to
version 3.5.7. Most notably, the software now no longer quits when
you close the main window. Also new is a success message after
adding attachments, easier Dropbox sync setup, and better password
strength reporting. Auto-correction and credit card filling are also
improved. Rounding out the release are extensive enhancements to the
software’s Google Chrome compatibility, and minor fixes for
Firefox 4 and Safari. ($39.95 new, free update, 19.7 MB)
Read/post comments about 1Password 3.5.7.
**iWeb 3.0.3** -- Apple has updated iWeb—the iLife ’11 hanger-on
that _isn’t_ iDVD—to version 3.0.3. The update addresses an
issue with the iSight Movie widget on certain Macs, and corrects
problems publishing iWeb sites via FTP. Apple also says that the
update “improves compatibility with Mac OS X,” which is good
news I suppose, since that’s the only operating system that iWeb
supports. ($49 new as part of iLife ’11, free update, 177.12 MB)
Read/post comments about iWeb 3.0.3.
**Adobe Acrobat/Reader 10.0.1** -- Adobe has released updates to its
PDF authoring and reading tools, Acrobat and Reader. The new
versions of each address critical security vulnerabilities and
improve overall stability. The Reader update also improves Protected
Mode, along with QTP, Flash, and SCCM support. (Free updates,
various sizes)
Read/post comments about Adobe Acrobat/Reader 10.0.1.
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ExtraBITS for 21 February 2011
------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff
article link:
Just a couple of quick links to check out this week: an article over
at The Economist by Glenn about Readability, and Lex Friedman’s
Macworld article about his backup strategy.
**Readability Service Aids Readers and Publishers** -- Readability has
added a subscription service akin to Instapaper, letting you convert
Web pages to stripped-down versions and archive those for later
reading from a Web account. Glenn Fleishman writes at The Economist
about how this service for readers will also benefit publishers.
Read/post comments
**Lex Friedman’s Backup Plan** -- Over at Macworld, Lex Friedman
details his backup strategy for keeping his Mac’s data secure, and
the paranoia that motivates his approach. The short version: Time
Machine, plus a bootable clone via SuperDuper, plus offsite backup
with CrashPlan, plus Dropbox, plus Google Docs. And did we mention
the heavy helping of data-loss paranoia?
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